Pubcopy

Pubcopy

Obsidian plugin that copies your notes as platform-optimized HTML to clipboard for pasting into Medium and Substack without formatting loss.

Install

From Obsidian (recommended)

Settings > Community plugins > Browse > Search "Pubcopy" > Install > Enable

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, styles.css from the latest release
2. Create folder: <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/pubcopy/
3. Copy the 3 files into that folder
4. Restart Obsidian
5. Settings > Community plugins > Enable "Pubcopy"

Usage

Three ways to trigger:

Each method offers three options:

• Copy for Medium
• Copy for Substack
• Copy as Markdown — clean markdown (Obsidian syntax stripped), for anywhere else

After copying, paste (Cmd/Ctrl+V) into the target editor.

What gets converted

56 Obsidian markdown elements are handled:

Medium and Substack receive HTML. "Copy as Markdown" returns cleaned markdown instead, so the HTML-specific rows below do not apply to it.

Settings

Settings > Community plugins > Pubcopy > Settings

Privacy & permissions

The Obsidian community store shows a "Clipboard Access" label for Pubcopy. That label is a generic notice applied to any plugin that touches the clipboard. Here is exactly what Pubcopy does:

• Writes only, never reads. Pubcopy calls navigator.clipboard.write() to place your converted note on the clipboard. It never reads the clipboard, so the label's "may expose content copied from outside Obsidian" warning does not apply. That warning concerns plugins that read clipboard contents.
• Only your note is copied. The clipboard payload is built solely from the note (or selection) you choose to copy, as text/html plus a text/plain fallback.
• Stays on your device. Pubcopy makes no network requests. Conversion, including math rendering and local image embedding, runs entirely on your machine. Remote image URLs are passed through untouched, never fetched.

Pubcopy is MIT-licensed open source. You don't have to take these claims on trust: the full source is in this repository, so anyone can read it and verify exactly what the plugin does.

Development

Prerequisites

• Node.js 24+
• npm

Setup

git clone https://github.com/canartuc/pubcopy.git
cd pubcopy
npm install

Build

# Development (watch mode, rebuilds on file change)
npm run dev

# Production build
npm run build

Test

# Run all tests
npm test

# Watch mode
npm run test:watch

Deploy to your vault

First run asks for your vault path and saves it to .deploy.json (gitignored):

npm run deploy
# > Obsidian vault path: /path/to/your/vault
# > Saved to .deploy.json
# > Deployed to .../plugins/pubcopy

Every subsequent run just builds and copies:

npm run deploy

After deploying, restart Obsidian or reload the plugin.

Project structure

src/
├── main.ts                    # Plugin entry, commands, menus
├── settings.ts                # Settings interface and tab
├── converter/
│   ├── index.ts               # Conversion pipeline orchestrator
│   ├── preprocessor.ts        # Strip frontmatter, tags, wikilinks, etc.
│   ├── html-converter.ts      # Markdown to HTML via remark/rehype
│   ├── image-handler.ts       # Local base64, remote URL, captions
│   ├── embed-resolver.ts      # Resolve ![[note]] embeds
│   ├── footnote-processor.ts  # Platform-specific footnotes
│   └── math-renderer.ts       # LaTeX via KaTeX
├── platforms/
│   ├── index.ts               # PlatformProfile interface
│   ├── medium.ts              # Medium-specific rules
│   └── substack.ts            # Substack-specific rules
├── clipboard/
│   └── writer.ts              # Clipboard API (text/html + text/plain)
└── utils/
    ├── errors.ts              # PubcopyError, WarningCollector
    └── notifications.ts       # Obsidian Notice wrappers

Release

Push a tag to trigger a GitHub Actions release:

# Update version in manifest.json and package.json first
git tag X.Y.Z
git push origin X.Y.Z

GitHub Actions runs tests, builds, and creates a release with main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css.

License

MIT